gwt-incubator – what’s in it?

gwt-incubator project is basically a gwt playpen area. It has a pretty good wiki with examples and descriptions. I just looked over the incubator trunk and compiled most of the demos and would like to share my summary of the widgets.

1) bulk loading table – basically a high performance HTML table generator based on innerHTML approach. No fancy demos, but here is the screenshot:

2) generator example – an example of a GWT generator. Nothing fancy but educational.

3) DatePicker – a pretty slick GWT calendar widget

4) Dropdown listbox – some kind of a new widget based a some newly prototyped GWT event model (it seems):

5) FastTree – again, another bulk generator this time for trees. Pretty neet and fast:

6) LogginDemo – basically an enhanced version of GWT logger for the browsers.

7) Paging scroll table and Scroll table – sophisticated grid/table widget supporting editing, column resizing, paging etc.

8) Pinned Panel – a neat sliding panel type widget with the panel capable of rolling from a side of the screen:

9) Progress bars – the oft requested GWT feature but for some reason missing from the core GWT:

10) Slider Bar – a powerful and sophisticated GWT slider implementation:

11) Spinners – anything non-visual that can spin, can be spinned :). pretty interesting, IMO:

12) Style injector/Immutable Resource Bundle – injecting CSS into GWT compilation result using annotations, and writing code within CSS to customize for different browsers or what not.

13) YouTube widget (or any Flash object) – embed YouTube videos or whatever other objects using GWT.

GWT 1.5 Final is now available

All GWT developers rejoyce! GWT 1.5 is here:

“This has been a big development cycle, and we’re really excited about the advancements in GWT over the last year. As always, we’re eager to hear your feedback once you’ve tried this new version.”

The detailed description of new features can be found in the official announcement

GWT1.5 RC2 now officially out

“GWT 1.5 RC2 includes a number of enhancements and fixes above and beyond those included in the first release candidate. Please see the release notes included in the installation archive for details.”

Read more here and here or just download it here

GWT 1.5 RC2 is out

Available under http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/downloads/list

“This release candidate includes a number of enhancements and fixes above and beyond those included in the first release candidate. Please see the release notes included in the installation archive for details. We will be updating the public documentation and posting further details on the Google Web Toolkit blog soon:

http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/

We’re eager to get everyone’s feedback, so please try it out!”

GWT is going non-monolithic (runAsync)

There have been many discussions on GWT forums about the monolithic nature of javascript produced by GWT’s java-to-javascript compiler (typical GWT compilation output consists of a single .js file produced for every major browser). Although this certainly is a tried-and-true approach in GWT for improving performance, many developers of large GWT-based projects would like to have the flexibility to partition their applications and load their parts dynamically at runtime. It looks like Google WebToolkit team is making great progress in implementing this exact functionality in a future release. I noticed this branch (called runAsync) within GWT trunk. And here is sneak peak at how it may look like in the code:

AsyncCallback<MyBigCompositeWidet> callback= new AsyncCallback<MyBigCompositeWidet>() {
public void onFailure(Throwable caught) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}

public void onSuccess(MyBigCompositeWidet result) {

result.setVisible(false);
}
};

GWT.createAsync(MyBigCompositeWidet.class, callback)

Pretty Slick!

GWT compiler is getting parallel (and faster)…

Google guys are gearing up to include much desired parallelization features into the GWT compiler. The feature is still really rough and only exists as a patch, but results are very promising. According to some folks who tried the patch the compilation time drops dramatically (40-50%) on the multicore workstations.

E.g. Showcase:
Before: (0:02:04.754)
After: (0:01:03.398)

Read more in this forum thread.